Shortcodes Everywhere – Another WordPress tool

With WordPress growing up every day and being a really powerful CMS, the beauty of it’s core allows external developers to contribute with their skills, and that’s why we can find out about tons of plugins which offer you the simplicity to built a site how-ever you need without having to go deeply with writing code.

I was inspired by that and imagined how could we make it possible to use WordPress to edit those non-dynamic parts.

The Idea

First I saw that amazing plugin called Aqua Page Builder, which allows you to construct your site on Layout Basis, not configuration basis, and than I thought a better way constructing your site is to have an intermediate visual feedback.

Solution

So the only way to edit your site, and see stuff visually immediately is to edit it from the Front-end (front view, not the admin panel), and there started the challenge building such a tool.

Architecture

First I needed an overlay navigation, a similar one which chrome dev tools has, to interface the user on which part he is going to work on, and I did it, where Bardh Lohaj helped me.

Than the challenge on how to inject those changes came out, and at first I thought using jQuery to inject those changes, but there where risks on dynamic content which some plugins might apply to the theme, and my code where it injects stuff might be to late, and there was another problem with Events, who are not designed to work with future added elements.

So I thought about trying to store everything WordPress output’s on a buffer, inject changes user decided to do, and release the output after changes are applied. That was possible only by using Ganon an amazing DOM Parser.

Community

This one should not be a commercial thing, as it might be a great thing if others will contribute on that, and it can somehow help WordPress usability and that why I licensed it with GPL and it is on a Github public repository and available for free download at WordPress Repository. And there I got help from Bardhi and Vleran Dushi.

Now everything is at the beginning, so I will try to build a better UI, a cool Logo and include some amazing screenshots. Stay tuned.

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